


it means noble

by Drac



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 07:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2183844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drac/pseuds/Drac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia Brooklaine before the plague.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it means noble

All that Lydia’s father ever cared about was that she knew her numbers. Not long before she had been born, Papa had bluffed some numbers like a damn fool, and been carefully conned out of his house and nearly a thousand coin. 

Lydia learns her numbers, chalking them out in the road with her brothers, big clear shapes – Papa makes sure of that – don’t curve your five too far, don’t loop your two, always draw a strike though your seven. Lydia has learned all the numbers Papa ever wanted her to by the time she’s eight years old, but she stays on at the charity school until she’s nearly twelve, gets up at first light and sits attentive in the back of the hall, checking and re-checking her own neat hand. She gets an award, in the end, for attendance, for endurance, and it’s presented by Lord Boyle himself, a friend of the Emperor, his fat pink hand holding just too tight onto her little medal, reluctant. 

‘Lydia,’ he says, ‘what a nice name. From the old Serk, you know -‘ she doesn’t know ‘- it means noble.’ 

At any rate, Lord Boyle was right to clutch at the medal – it’s only little, but it’s real gold, and Papa’s ever so proud – his little girl, cream of the charity school, shaking hands with a Lord, she could become a proper Lady, but not really – she helps clean the apartments of old ladies with her friend Lucy, and in the summers they stand looking out of the windows into the streets, where shirtless boys kick a ball in the long shadows of apartment buildings, and sometimes they call out to them – they’re popular, and clever, she keeps the score and counts up the points, Lucy makes up naughty chants for whichever boy stands in goal. Her oldest brother never comes home from Morley. 

That summer she gets her first boyfriend, a friend of her poor dead brother, but not really, an acquaintance of her now oldest brother, he’s paying condolences or something and he’s slow and stumbles over his own thick tongue but there’s a charm there, definitely, and he gives her a job at the pub his father owns, The Blue Emperor, because he’s not so good with his numbers and she can help him out, and she’s thirteen and still little enough to crawl into spaces to collect fallen coin or work with fiddly barrel taps, and then she’s brave enough to push big drunk bastards out of the door, and Damien dumps her when his father promotes her to a proper bar-maid. 

Lydia’s flirty and cheeky but she’s also numerate and ruthless, and she won’t accept a coin less than she’s due – Papa taught her that. That summer is also the summer that Papa loses most of his fingers in one of the new powered looms, the summer when her youngest brother is taken away by the ‘seers. That winter, when business is slow, Damien’s father tries to stick his rotten prick in her mouth, and she nearly bites it off. Nearly. He’s lucky. She goes to work at The Whaler’s Catch. 

The Catch is more respectable than the Emperor, and some of the girls she talks to over the bar are real servants, who change chamber-pots and tie corsets, and Lydia can’t think of anything more dull. Lucy gets a job in the Brimsley’s kitchens, and she says that it’s a much better job for girls their age than stinky pubs full of filthy blokes and maybe she’s right, but Lydia pictures her own name in gold calligraphy; Brooklaine’s Bar – she sees it so often it burns her mind’s eye and there’s nothing else she wants. When she’s fifteen she finds out that Lord Boyle has named his second daughter Lydia, and not a single person will believe that it’s after her, even when she shows them her inscribed medal, of course you didn’t inspire him, of course not, it’s just a coincidence, you stupid girl. 

Papa dies when she’s twenty-two and her four remaining brothers are all in paying jobs or paying gangs, and the headstone he’s had saved up and half-carved for nearly thirty years is worthless since the water table rose, but they all pool their money and get a lovely gilded urn – Lydia even goes to Mother’s House, districts away, to invite her to the funeral, but in the end they fight, and Mother doesn’t turn up anyway. When Lydia gets back to work that evening the Catch has burned to the ground. She goes to work at The Protector’s Arms, and then the Ox’s Head, the Hagfish Sisters, the Overseer’s Hound, the Tyvian Maid, the Pup and Bull, the Hound Pits. 

The Pits is… Lydia likes the Pits, she likes the big square bar and big courtyard and booths, the locked workshop and the taproom. She likes the dogs, with their scarred muzzles and swishy tails and fluffy fur between the pads of their toes. Whenever the hounds have pups some overseers will come to take away the toughest ones, and leave the pub with the ones with silly markings on their coats and floppy ears, but they’ll fight, they’ll always fight. When Lydia comes to the Pits it’s owned by a little old woman with no teeth and two middle fingers raised to the world, who doesn’t mind about the men and ladies that Lydia takes to bed in the evening, just that she wipes down the bar and kicks out the troublemakers, and Lydia can do that. 

One day the old girl’s grandsons come in and take her away, and the bar is sold to a grizzled Admiral with shoulders the same breadth as a doorway who turns up once a month and stage-wrestles dogs bare-chested. The Admiral frightens Lydia because she can never tell if he’s being sarcastic or serious even if he laughs as he says something, his eyes always flicker dangerously, and like her he can pick out a noble in disguise from a hundred paces but they never amuse him like they amuse her. 

By the time Lydia’s forty the majority of her job is keeping the ‘disguised’ nobles who come to watch the dogs from being shanked, whether that means reluctantly giving them a look at her tits or just keeping them on the tics that only sober people notice. Some of them are better at it than others, the watery-eyed skinny git who has four hundred elaborate lies to excuse for his enunciation almost makes himself popular, and the loud-mouthed boy with the ginger curls only breaks character once, when he gets his nose broken – Lydia takes him up to the servants’ room to tend it, and watches a pissy teenaged girl emerge from the stoic boy when she calls him Timsh under her breath – don’t you dare, you wouldn’t dare, you vile woman, don’t you tell them, I’ll get you. 

Harry who looks after the dogs gets a wicked cold, and Lydia says he can stay upstairs under some proper bedsheets until he gets better, and he vomits on the floor and bleeds from the eyes and the Admiral shoots him four times before he dies, and there’s splattered gore on everything and bullet-holes in the walls and the man renting the next room says he’ll call the City Watch, you can’t just kill people, and the Admiral shoots him, too.

**Author's Note:**

> originally for a prompt on tumblr a few months ago but i'm actually quite fond of this and i adore lydia so this was mainly an excuse to put another fic in her tag to be honest


End file.
